A new line of paint from Dulux, using technology and practices developed over a three-year research period, has significantly lower impacts than Dulux's previous paints.

Dulux's Ecosense line of paint comes out in March this year. The Ecosense Matt has 50 percent less embodied carbon, 50 percent less embodied water, 40 percent less waste and almost zero volatile organic compounds when compared to the Dulux Standard Matt from 2008. Its packaging will contain 20 percent recycled content.

At the same time Dulux announced the new paint, it released a report, "Paint The Town Green," detailing the three-year research project that looked at lowering the impacts of paint over its life cycle, with five areas of focus: suppliers, formulation and production, packaging and delivery, paint use, and end-of-life.

The project was a collaboration among AzkoNobel (the owner of Dulux), Forum for the Future and Carillion, a paint specifier and user. They published the report in order to share their strategies for looking at, and improving, the life cycle impacts, hoping that their efforts could be replicated in other industries and with other products.

It also looks at the many other results that came out of the project, which include:

• The Environmental Impact Analyser, a tool developed by Forum for the Future for measuring and minimizing the impact of paint at each stage of its life cycle
• Paint cans that use less plastic and are easier to clean and, therefore, easier to recycle
• The Environmental Wash System, a mobile cleaning station launched in the U.K. in 2008 that cleans brushes, rollers and other items at building sites and filters paint residue from water
• A cleaning process for production equipment that takes water used to clean the equipment and reuses it to make paint instead of having it shipped off to be treated and purified
• Dulux's Ecosure paints, which launched in May 2008 and started off with 25 percent less carbon, water and waste than other paints. The impacts of Ecosure paint have since been lowered further, and Dulux plans to roll out the strategies used with Ecosure to the rest of its paint lines.